Bloomington Police say they need to get ahead of AI, not fall behind.
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Artificial intelligence is changing our world fast.
Bloomington Police say they need to get ahead of AI not fall behind.
“We recently put out a posting, we’re gonna have two artificial intelligence officers,” said Police Chief Booker Hodges. “So I think we might be the first fleet police department to do that.”
Chief Hodges isn’t talking about a Robocop. He’s looking to hire two real, human employees who could look into how AI can be used to help the department.
“Law enforcement typically trails behind and most technology pieces,” said Hodges. “So my goal with this is to get ahead of it.”
He says he wants to be very careful with this technology, any evidence would need human verification.
“Their primary responsibility is going to be to explore how we could utilize this technology, one, with body worn camera video, how can we use it to redact it?” said Hodges. “And two, to see if how criminals might be using it.”
He says AI could also be used to make radio traffic more accessible to the public, which could automatically detect and censor private information.
They could also use it to recognize false reports.
“With swatting calls, it’d be nice to have some AI to be able to determine if this is an actual person or if this is an AI,” the chief said.
But he says part of the challenge will be moral dilemmas that would come up.
“I get very cautious when I hear people wanting to use it for predictive models, like predicting a certain person is going to commit a crime,” said Hodges. “I just think that’s going down a path we don’t want to go down.”
Candidates for the job will come from within the department itself, and will be given special training.
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